JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
Mother in Death
Ma Mère morte
1915
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
James Ensor’s mother lies on her deathbed. This is a
graphic portrait showing a body marked by illness and
decay, the mouth fallen open, a profile like a bird of prey
and folded hands revealing a hint of the skeleton’s
contours. The deathbed is pushed to the background. In
the foreground there’s a still life of medicine bottles and
flasks. The statuette of a saint is enthroned on a baroque
cupboard. Together the medicines and statuette symbolise
medicine and religion’s (lost) struggle against death.
Ensor’s mother, Marie Louise Cathérine Haegheman, was
for a long time the strong woman of the family. She took
over her parents’ business and continued to run it in her
own name. The family had several branches in Ostend and
Blankenberge, where they sold earthenware, porcelain,
shells, perfumed flowers, Chinese vases, coral from Naples
and jewellery from Algiers, Tunis and Constantinople. They
had trading links with Singapore, Hong Kong, Matanzas
and Nassau. In the season Ensor’s mother and her sister
worked very hard. In the winter they could doze off in a
deserted Ostend. In an after-dinner speech Ensor
explained that his mother and his aunt Mimi had helped
him financially through the most difficult years.
His mother was eighty when she died on 8 March 1915,
after a long struggle with death. Ensor was fifty five at the
time. In the hours and days after her death Ensor drew his
mother at least four times and painted her twice, working
day after day from 8 till 11 March.
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
View of the Van Iseghemlaan
Vue du Boulevard Van Iseghem
1906
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
In 1876 the Ensor family moved to a spacious, brand new
property on the corner of the Vlaanderenstraat and the
Van Iseghemlaan. It was a stately building with a shop on
the ground floor and some storeys with rooms for tourists.
The sixteen-year-old James Ensor was allowed to arrange
the attic room as his studio. In this little mansard room
high above the streets, Ensor painted the roofs of the
Vlaanderenstraat and the Van Iseghemlaan many times –
in the sun, the rain and the snow. It was his observation
post, from which he had a broad view over the roofs and
towers of Ostend, the countryside in the distance and the
busy streets below. He spent many hours isolated in his
studio, deep in concentration on the countless paintings,
engravings and drawings, which he produced in
surprisingly quick succession. Willy Finch used the studio
for a while, too.
Through his work we see the neighbourhood evolve from a
dilapidated barracks area, with neglected Royal stables,
into a worldly centre with Alban Chambon’s theatre
complex as its central point. In this work from 1906
Ostend is ‘the Queen of Seaside Resorts’ at the height of
its fame.
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
Still Life with book of Jean Teugels
Ensor and Leman
Discussing Painting
Stilleven met boek van Jean Teugels
April 1938
Oil on panel
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
James Ensor’s still lifes often look like the display window
of his mother’s shop, with fans, exotic shells, masks, dolls
and Chinese and Korean teapots and vases. This type of
‘Chinoiserie’, as Ensor called it, was very popular with
tourists in Ostend. His mother used to order the
knickknacks for the shop from the well-known Siegfried
(later Samuel) Bing, amongst others.
In his later still lifes Ensor frequently painted flowers that
his good friend Augusta Boogaerts brought for him. She
often helped the artist to arrange his still lifes. Ensor
deliberately kept the compositions simple, so that he could
devote himself completely to the reflection of the light on
the objects and the reproduction of the colours.
In 1931 Jean Teugels, a magistrate from Veurne, had the
printing house Le Carillon print the booklet Variations sur
James Ensor (Variations on James Ensor). He saw his
publication immortalised in this little work in oil on panel.
Ensor en Leman
in gesprek over de schilderkunst
1890
Oil on panel
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
In Ensor and Leman discussing painting the artist presents
himself as the adversary of General Leman, who threatens
the artist with a toy cannon. Ensor ripostes with a
paintbrush as a feather duster.
Ensor often displayed both friends and enemies in his
etchings and drawings. It is difficult to make out whether
this was an expression of Ensor’s personal frustrations or
existential fears.
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
View of Mariakerke
After the storm
Vue de Mariakerke
1901
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.Zee, Ostend
Après l’orage
1880
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
From the dunes the artist directed his gaze on the
peaceful fishing village of Mariakerke and the polders
behind it. This spot with its medieval village church just
behind the as yet unspoiled belt of dunes was much loved
by walkers and artists.
After the Storm is one of the first paintings that Ensor
made after he finished his studies at the academy. It is an
impressionist view of the sea just as the sun breaks
through again after an early morning storm. The rising sun
colours the clouds pink and we can see a fragment of a
rainbow, which can only be observed in Ostend early in
the morning above the open sea.
There is something strange about this canvas. When he
painted it Ensor used his etching Large View of Mariakerke
as a guide, so the painting, like the prints of the etching,
shows the real view in mirror image.
An older variation of this canvas is dated 1896. In that
particular work the perspective is a bit higher so that more
of the hinterland can be seen, and the topographical
representation is correct.
Ensor was buried in the graveyard of the Church of Our
Lady depicted here in 1949.
In May 1880 James Ensor finally closed the door of the
Brussels Academy behind him. Back in Ostend he set to
work diligently in his attic under the roof of his parents’
home, at the corner of the Van Iseghemlaan and the
Vlaanderenstraat. The house stood on top of the filled-in
city canal, fifty metres from the seafront. So Ensor was
very familiar with the sea and its endless different shades
of light and colour in combination with sun, clouds, mist
and wind.
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
Large Seascape – Sunset
Grande marine – Coucher de soleil
1885
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Large Seascape - Sunset is an impressionist view of the
sea as the sun sets and the sea and clouds turn red. Ensor
demonstrates here how extremely sensitive he is to the
different effects of the light. In format it is one of his
largest canvases.
Ensor only painted seascapes intensively for a few years,
from 1880 to 1885. A convinced pleinairist he produced all
of his drawings and paintings of that period on the beach
or in the dunes. Artists from all over the country came by
train to practise pleinairism on the coast and study the
endless expanse of the sea. They took their painting
materials with them, a box full of industrially made paint
in tubes. As a result artists paid much more attention to
the light and colour. Ensor, too, tried to capture his
subjective experience of the reality in paint. Often he used
a palette knife. For Large Seascape –Sunset he used long,
thin brushstrokes.
“Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But the day
will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. Its
rule, which contests the real at the same time as it gives it
its unity, is also that of revolt.”
Albert Camus
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
Self-portrait with a Flowered Hat
Autoportrait au chapeau fleuri
1883 - 1888
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
This self-portrait was painted in 1883 and follows along
the same lines as the self-portraits produced from 1879
onwards. Here Ensor is just more adult and has a beard
and moustache. Initially it was a ‘normal’ portrait. In 1888
he reworked it with a felt hat with flowers, some upward
strokes added to the moustache and the four circle
fragments.
In the early 1960s the discovery was first made that
between 1886 and 1891 Ensor had partially drawn and
painted over many of the drawings and paintings from his
early years, like Self-portrait with a Flowered Hat, adding
demonic and carnivalesque motifs. If we look at the work
carefully there are indeed clear differences in technique
between the actual portrait and the additions.
Opinions differ about the circle fragments. Some think
they are a reference to the well-known self-portrait by
Rubens in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna,
reproductions of which Ensor undoubtedly knew. The
allusion to Rubens could be linked to the artist’s
considerable self-confidence – he presents himself as the
Rubens of the nineteenth century. Others see the
suggestion of a mirror in the circle fragments, or a
reference to baroque English portraits, where the arcs of
the circles function as some sort of trompe-l’oeil
medallions, peepholes behind which the artist is
portrayed.
“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s
autobiography.”
Federico Fellini
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
left the Royal Chalet and the Wellington race course can
be seen.
The Baths of Ostend
The scene was an occasion for Ensor to criticise the
various walks of life and the prudishness that reigned at
the time. The picture would be refused at the salon of La
Libre Esthétique in 1895 or 1898. But when Ensor
complained about this to Leopold II, Maus was obliged to
get it out of the reserves and give it a place of honour –
according to Ensor himself in his writings, ‘Les Écrits’.
De baden van Oostende
1891
India ink on paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
This ink drawing refers back to a work in oil, chalk and
coloured pencil on panel from 1890. There is also an
engraved version of the same theme that repeats the ink
drawing, but oddly enough not in mirror image.
Ensor playfully sketches a busy summer day in Ostend.
Horses pull the bathing machines over the beach so that
bathers could go straight into the sea without having to
walk a whole distance over the beach or in the shallow
water. On top of the bathing machines curious men ogle
pretty women in the sea through their binoculars. Alone or
in twos the many bathers form small, grotesque tableaux.
At the bottom, the beau monde and a few day-trippers
watch too: a priest and an officer, locals, foreigners, men
and women. We can recognise General Leman, Eugène
Demolder and Mariette Rousseau, because this scene, too,
is a fragment from Ensor’s autobiography. A photographer
has hauled his tripod up onto the roof of a bathing
machine and disappears under the black cloth. In the top
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
The Cathedral
La Cathédrale
1886
Etching on Japanese paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
The Cathedral is generally considered to be one of the
most important etchings in Ensor’s graphic oeuvre. It is
one of the most sought-after prints.
The etching is an early example of large crowds as a
theme in Ensor’s work, a motif that was to reach its
highpoint in his Christ’s Entry into Brussels.
For the Gothic church building Ensor took his inspiration
from a picture of Aachen Cathedral. For the two towers he
used (a picture of?) another, as yet unidentified church as
an example.
It seems to suggest a party, a parade or a procession. But
the significance is difficult to explain. Was Ensor alluding
to the church as an institution that dominated the society
of his time? Or is it simply a fantastic vision featuring the
splendour of Gothic architecture?
In 1896 he would engrave a second version of this
successful print which, for the unpractised eye, is difficult
to differentiate from the first.
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
Devils Thrashing Angels and Archangels
The Pisser
Diables rossant anges et archanges
1888
Etching with watercolours on Holland paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Le Pisseur
1887
Etching on Japanese paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Devils Thrashing Angels and Archangels, with amusing
devils, monsters and sarcastic masks, is a picture in the
spirit of works by Bosch and Bruegel.
This etching with the famous inscription ‘Ensor est un fou’
(Ensor is a fool) shows a urinating man. A scene that was
common in the townscape of Ostend in those days.
Amongst certain classes of the population a sense of
shame had not yet really developed.
Encouraged by his good friend Mariette Rousseau, Ensor
first started to make etchings in 1886, two years before he
produced this one. In terms of graphics 1888 was an
amazing year for the artist – he made no less than 45
etchings.
Ensor was extremely interested in ordinary people. With
his friend Willy Finch he made many charcoal etchings of
popular figures from the Ostend fishing milieu. As in every
town or village in those days there were many poor,
sometimes homeless people, as well as odd vagabonds,
beggars and pariahs to be seen on the streets every day.
In fact it was forbidden for beggars to stand along the
entrance to the pier, where they importuned people going
for a walk.
“The true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times
is to give vivification to facts, to science, and to common
lives, endowing them with the glow and glories and final
illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to
real things only. Without that ultimate vivification – which
the poet and other artists alone can give – reality would
seem incomplete and science, democracy, and life itself
finally in vain.”
Walt Whitman
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
The Entry of Christ into Brussels
L’Entrée du Christ à Bruxelles
1898
Coloured etching on paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
This etching is a repeat, in mirror image and with a few
changes, of the painting The Entry of Christ into Brussels
from 1888-1889. In Western art history the painting itself
is considered to be a key work of the nineteenth century
and it is definitely Ensor’s artistic manifesto. Nonetheless
it had little influence on the course of art history. Only a
few privileged visitors to Ensor’s studio were able to see it
close up before it was exhibited publicly for the very first
time during the Ensor retrospective in the Palais des
Beaux Arts in Brussels in 1929.
The work is full of allegories and allusions to Belgian
politics, literature, people with whom the artist was
getting even, and society, of which he was very critical.
The Christ figure in the middle of the work, very central
but still rather inconspicuous, is Ensor himself. Ensor felt
humiliated and ridiculed, like Christ, and felt he was like
the Messiah of modern art. He makes a triumphal entry
into Brussels, the Mecca of Belgian art and art criticism. A
few members of the artists’ movement Les XX stand on a
balcony. They are literally sick with envy and jealousy.
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
Hop-Frog’s Revenge
De wraak van Hop-Frog
1898
Coloured etching on Japanese paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
This print illustrates the highpoint of the story of
Hop-Frog by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Ensor
often drew his inspiration from work by the famous writer,
who is known for his detective stories and his humorous
horror. Ensor had a collection of stories by Poe entitled
Extraordinary Stories. He incorporated some of them into
his work, notably those about King Pest and Hop-Frog.
The etching Hop-Frog shows the scene in which a hideous
jester takes terrible revenge on the king and his seven
ministers. He manages through a ruse to hoist the king
and his ministers, dressed as apes and smeared with tar,
on a chain high above the banqueting hall of the palace
and to set fire to them. The guests don’t really seem to be
affected by the sight of the chandelier of burning human
flesh.
In 1885 already Ensor had made a lithograph of the same
subject. The etching – one of the best known of his oeuvre
– is a faithful reproduction in mirror image of the litho.
Ensor also produced a painting with the same theme in
1896.
Émile Verhaeren, who was a great friend of Ensor,
described the importance of Edgar Allan Poe as a source of
inspiration for Ensor’s work in his study of the artist.
Thanks to translations by Mallarmé and Baudelaire, the
American’s work was quite popular in Paris and the
surrounding area. Baudelaire’s versions of his
Extraordinary Stories were published in Paris in 1856 and
1857, while Mallarmé’s translations of Poe’s poems were
published by Deman in Brussels in 1888, a year before
they came off the presses in Paris.
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
The Cataclysms
Les Cataclysmes
1888
Etching with watercolours on Holland paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
In The Cataclysms Ensor takes a caricatural approach to
the theme of a world catastrophe. The four elements are
unleashed: water (sea), air (wind), fire, earth (collapsing
mountains). Two trains collide with each other. The
roguish characters in the last carriages still have no idea
of the damage.
A similar motif is repeated in an oil painting of the same
name from 1937.
JAMES ENSOR
1860, Ostend – 1949, Ostend
Scandalised masks
Masques scandalisés
1895
Etching on Japanese paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Etching after the painting of the same name from 1883.
Masks first make their entry into James Ensor’s work in
the painting Scandalised Masks. He used them as a means
of projecting the idea of chimera, fears, farces and
trickery. “In 1883 the masks touch me deeply”, wrote
Ensor in Les Écrits. “The Scandalised Masks force their
way in, put their collars up and turn up their pointed,
astonished noses.”
The flood of Chinoiserie that poured into the salons of the
middle classes at the end of the nineteenth century, the
japonisme, the colonial climate, the cardboard masks with
the garish colours of Ostend’s carnival are probably what
led to the presence of masks in Ensor’s work.
Initially he portrayed the masks mainly as a game of
disguise. Five years later the masks had become
indispensable elements in his impressive oeuvre.
The painting Scandalised Masks probably only acquired
this title later on. At the Salon des XX in February 1884 it
was exhibited as The Masks, n° 2.
LÉON SPILLIAERT
1881, Ostend – 1946, Brussels
Vertigo – The Enchanted Staircase
De duizeling – Tovertrap
1908
India ink wash and coloured pencil on paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
From the almost black void a sort of high tower rises. The
snow-white stairs stand out from the darkness of the
tempting background. On the vertical, curving staircase
stands a woman with flying hair, shrieking, out of her
mind with fear. She almost loses her balance, the
foreshortened stairs offering no support. She hangs on
tightly to the top, her mouth and eyes distorted in a
grimace of fear. It seems like a nightmare from which she
cannot escape.
The work borders on abstract art. The structure of the
stairs and the silhouette of the woman are simplified
starkly to leave only powerful volumes. Spilliaert hardly
ever used a classic composition. He looked at the scene
from above or from below. For his unusual division of
space Spilliaert took his inspiration from Japanese prints,
which recall asymmetry, the cutting of a scene, depth
without volume, lively movement, rhythm and decorative
arabesques.
His use of materials is very varied too. Some of his works
he made with only India ink, which he used either pure or
as a wash, diluted with water to make it a lighter shade of
grey. But most of his works are constructed with mixed
techniques - a varying combination of India ink,
watercolours, gouache, pastels, charcoal, chalk, wax
crayons, and drawing, coloured or conté pencils, which he
applied in a manner more evocative of painting than of
drawing.
LÉON SPILLIAERT
1881, Ostend – 1946, Brussels
LÉON SPILLIAERT
1881, Ostend – 1946, Brussels
The Gust of Wind
Self-portrait with Mirror
De windstoot
Zelfportret met spiegel
1904
India ink wash, watercolours and gouache on paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
1908
India ink wash, watercolour and coloured pencil on paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Léon Spilliaert often portrayed a woman at the edge of the
water. The theme of a girl or woman on the seafront with
her dress blown up appeared frequently in the graphic art
of the end of the nineteenth century. Félicien Rops and
Édouard Dubar made similar humorous prints. Spilliaert
depicted this banal occurrence in an expressionist form
and style. He reduced the woman to a dark silhouette,
outlined sharply against the decorative play of the rippling
water. It briefly evokes the figure in Edvard Munch’s The
Scream. Spilliaert was fascinated by the special
relationship of the woman to the sea – by their
comparable temperaments.
In Self-portrait with mirror from 1908 we find ourselves in
the living room of Spilliaert’s parents’ house. We see a
mantelpiece with decorative vases and a clock, a high gilt
neo-rococo mirror and paintings on the wall. Everything is
bathed in night-time light.
In front of the mirror stands the black silhouette of
Spilliaert with dilated pupils and mouth wide open in a
terrifying scream. The figure is situated between two
mirrors; it seems even to be squeezed between them. In
the mirror a dreadful confrontation with himself takes
place. What is hallucinatory is that the wall seems to curve
away, as if everything is spinning in the artist’s head. In
front of the mirror on the fireplace there is a clock under a
bell-glass, showing time ticking away.
“I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I
know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded
revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the
past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.”
LÉON SPILLIAERT
1881, Ostend – 1946, Brussels
John Berger
Self-portrait with red pencil
Zelfportret met rood potlood
1908
India ink wash, gouache and pastel on paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
During his youth Spilliaert painted a series of selfportraits. Initially they were simple renderings of his
appearance, but later they evolved into complex pictures
in which reality, reflection and fantasy merged.
In Self-portrait with red pencil he presented himself as a
black silhouette with dark-outlined glassy eyes in an
angular face. The bony hands grip a red pencil
determinedly. He is in a room in his parents’ house, in
night-time light, and wears a dark suit with a stiff collar,
as he often did. Everyone who met Spilliaert in those days
was struck by his appearance, which betrayed his
tortured, restless spirit.
LÉON SPILLIAERT
1881, Ostend – 1946, Brussels
Girls with White Stockings
Meisjes met witte kousen
1912
Pastel, coloured pencils and wax crayons on paper
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
In Spilliaert’s time there were at least two girls’ boarding
schools with a certain standing in Ostend. So Spilliaert was
undoubtedly familiar with boarding school girls walking
through the city or on the seafront under the watchful eye
of a nun.
These Girls with White Stockings are probably boarding
school girls out walking. Spilliaert was not so much
interested in the story or the anecdote. He opted for a
playful composition with repetitive forms: slender girls’
bodies with long hair tied with ribbons, four of them seen
from behind and one in profile. He emphasises the play of
their legs and feet by making them white.
As so often with Spilliaert Girls with White Stockings is not
the only picture on this theme. Other works, like Three
Girls Seen from Behind and Girls on the Beach, both from
1912, dealt with the same theme.
LUC TUYMANS
1958, Mortsel
Clouds
Wolken
1986
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
“I wanted to paint like the sea and the sky above the sea,
Not let myself be caught. Only one teacher understood
me. He took me aside and set me off on a long journey.
The man must be old now. I never saw him again after
school. But I am grateful to him. And I keep going back to
the North Sea. To the beach at Ostend. For kilometreslong night-time walks along the tide line. To rouse the
images in me at night that I want to paint by day.”
Luc Tuymans
LUC TUYMANS
1958, Mortsel
ANN VERONICA JANSSENS
1956, Folkstone (GB)
The Nape
Corps noir
2001
Plexiglas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend gift Friends of Mu.ZEE,
Collection Province of West Flanders
Figuur op de rug gezien (La nuque)
1987
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Tuymans based The Nape, an early painting from the
nineteen eighties, on a photo of a concentration camp
commander standing at the edge of a mass grave. When
he had finished the painting Tuymans stabbed holes in the
canvas with a knife. “Because it is a very violent picture I
deliberately wounded it”, he explained.
Tuymans painted the figure in a drab shade of grey, like a
leftover from the painting process, the dirty sludge left
when all the colours on the palette had got mixed up. “I
drew the outline of the figure,” said Tuymans in an
interview, “and gradually the grease from the paints
penetrated the picture.”
Ann Veronica Janssens works with light, sound and space.
Because of her fascination with space she nearly became
an architect. But her architectural studies failed to provide
her with what she was looking for. Since then she has
sought her own form language, akin to the post-minimalist
tradition. Her materials are transparent, brilliant or just
invented and seemingly inaccessible. They are very varied
in nature: concrete blocks, bricks – sometimes packed in
aluminium foil – glass, mirrors or mist. Often they reflect
the environment and the light, which makes for surprising
optical effects. Her work has always been linked to space:
open or closed, full or empty, small or vast.
MARCEL BROODTHAERS
1924, Saint-Gilles – 1976, Cologne (DE)
MARCEL BROODTHAERS
1924, Saint-Gilles – 1976, Cologne (DE)
Plaque Academic Forms
Department of Eagles
Tableau formes académiques
Département des Aigles
1970
Plastic relief
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
1968
Plastic relief
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Marcel Broodthaers depicted rebus-like figures with a
variety of drawing systems such as the alphabet, the
theory of forms and road signs on plastic panels. Some of
them are extremely complex, others remarkably simple,
but what they all have in common is that they raise the
issue of the relationship between artistic and economic
values. Broodthaers himself pointed out that this type of
plaque is manufactured ‘like waffles’.
In 1968 Broodthaers began his vast project Museum of
Modern Art, Department of Eagles, his own fictitious
museum. He made the first section, XIXth Century
Section, in his studio, where he placed a few empty
transport crates and hung up a couple of reproductions of
paintings. In the midst of this strange ensemble he invited
friends, colleagues and anyone else who happened to be
interested to discuss the role of museums and the way in
which artworks should be exhibited. According to
Broodthaers modern museums map out the cultural world
by removing objects from daily life and then arranging
them chronologically, stylistically or thematically.
The theme of the eagle had a special significance for
Broodthaers. In art history the eagle has always evoked
greatness, authority, the desire to conquer and
imperialism. That is why he identified the eagle with art.
“I think that the practise of art is an examination of visual
communication. People have to recognize visual culture as
a constructed language, a language that acquires
meanings through its construction. The art viewer should
not simply be a patsy who performs a set of knee-jerk
responses in reaction to a set of visual conventions. Art
should be more complex than that.”
JEAN BRUSSELMANS
1884, Brussels – 1953, Dilbeek
The Storm
La tempête
1938
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Mike Kelley
Jean Brusselmans was particularly productive in the
second half of the nineteen thirties, a period in which he
completed over seventy paintings and watercolours.
Undisturbed he sought his own style and laid the
foundations for his best compositions. The Storm is a nice
example of this. Brusselmans painted a first version of The
Storm in a larger format in 1936. He divided the
composition into two horizontal parts. The triangular
structure of yellow sunrays shining through the clouds
onto the water is striking. Despite the dynamic and
turbulent natural events, it looks as if the storm has
solidified into something immovable.
Brusselmans regularly travelled to the Belgian coast.
Ostend and Zeebruges were his favourite places. He
painted many different variations on the sea, the harbour
and the lighthouse in Ostend. For the waves of the sea
Brusselmans alternated endlessly between broad strong
brushstrokes in flowing lines and short thick paint spots
with lots of substance.
ROGER RAVEEL
1921, Machelen-aan-de-Leie
Homage to Giotto
“It is hard for many - even cultural - people to understand
that harmony is not the absence of contrasts but the
presence of contrasts in a situation where the constituent
parts keep each other in place like loads.”
Wolfgang Rihm
Hommage à Giotto
1956
Oil on panel
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
In Homage to Giotto Raveel manipulates the
perspectivistic properties of colour. We see a man from
behind. His back is an expanse of blue, the head is a blank
outlined in the red expanse of a window like a white spot.
Without using perspective Raveel put the blue spot in the
foreground, the red behind it. Yet cold colours like green,
blue and violet actually tend by nature to regress while
warm colours push forward.
Around the middle of the twentieth century, when lyrical
abstraction was dominant in Belgium, Roger Raveel
developed his own language of images. He explored
spaces with direct forms and a bright, lively palette of
colours. He did this, on the one hand, by chopping off his
canvasses or letting them flow over into space, and by the
integration of white expanses outlined with broad black
frames, on the other. He went even further when – before
the advent of pop art – he integrated real objects into his
works. The use of a mirror brought even the viewer and
his environment into the work.
GEORGES VANTONGERLOO
1886, Antwerp – 1965, Paris (FR)
Woman in Interior
Personage in interieur – Vrouw in interieur
1916
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Georges Vantongerloo produced the painting Woman in
Interior while he was still in his formative years. He
trained to be a sculptor at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts
in Antwerp. Wounded as a soldier in the First World War
he fled to the Netherlands in 1916. During his stay there
he experimented with painting in a post-impressionist
style, along the lines of his contemporary, Rik Wouters.
In 1916, too, he first brought his whole oeuvre together
for a solo exhibition in The Hague. A year later, with
Mondriaan and Van Doesburg, he put his signature on the
manifesto of De Stijl. Thereby subscribing to the view that
painting, sculpture and architecture are approached from
the same simple plastic elements, with the ambition of
constructing one universal plastic language.
GEORGES VANTONGERLOO
1886, Antwerp – 1965, Paris (FR)
JULES SCHMALZIGAUG
1882, Antwerp – 1917, The Hague (NL)
Man in interior (self-portrait)
Man in interieur
1916-1917
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Dynamic Sensation of Dance
Dynamische uitdrukking
van de beweging eener danseres
1914
Distemper on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Although the formats are not identical Woman in Interior,
from 1916, and Man in Interior (self-portrait), from 19161917, form as it were each other’s counterparts. The dates
of the two works are very close to the date of Georges
Vantongerloo and Tine Kalis’s wedding.
In contrast to the portrait of his wife, done in a pointillist
technique, Vantongerloo has incorporated a highly
developed colour study into his self-portrait. Proof of this
are the red, green, yellow and blue zones in the painting.
This makes this self-portrait a turning point, a forerunner
of what was to follow. Or as Vantongerloo himself wrote,
“from 1906 to 1916 the subject was space but nature’s
solution to it”.
Due to his premature death Jules Schmalzigaug has
remained almost unknown. Nonetheless his small oeuvre
is an important link in Belgian art. Having become
acquainted with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist
Manifesto in Paris, he expressed the ideas of futurism in
his work. During a visit to Milan he met Umberto Boccioni,
Gino Severini and Giacomo Balla, the representatives of
this Italian movement, and he exhibited with them.
Futurism has its roots in impressionism and pointillism as
well as cubism and expressionism. The focus is on the
representation of dynamic movement, an ode to urban life
and modern industry. Schmalzigaug’s effervescent
paintings also show his knowledge of colours, which is
based on the theories of Paul Signac and his ‘illuminating
light’.
“A curious project: to dream, to turn that dream into
reality which then becomes a dream again in other
people’s heads!”
Jean Genet
WALTER SWENNEN
1946, Brussels (Forêt)
Pen
Plume
1998
Oil on panel
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Walter Swennen was originally a poet, and began to paint
more or less by chance, in order to “make the poetic
thoughts more powerful”. Gradually images became more
important. Swennen’s paintings show concise images (a
banana, a teddy bear, a lamp, a tricycle, etc.), which have
about them the simplicity and recognisability of strip
cartoons and the naivety of schoolbook illustrations.
Swennen combines this rather popular public language of
images with abstract elements, in a personal,
expressionist painting technique. The banality of the
iconography used combined with the importance of word is
reminiscent of the conceptual humour in the work of René
Magritte or Marcel Broodthaers.
“The only way to grasp what is new in the new is to
analyse it through the lenses of what was.”
Slavoj Žižek
EVELYNE AXELL
1936, Namur – 1972, Zwijnaarde
The Lovely Month of May
Joli mois de mai
1970
Unalit, enamel paint on Plexiglas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Lovely Month of May shows a group of naked boys sitting
together on the grass, listening quietly to a pop concert.
In the background a young girl waves a red flag. The
artwork is a reference to the famous painting Liberty
Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix. But Axell’s
revolution is that of May 1968.
The right-hand panel shows a naked figure with a paint
pot in one hand and a paintbrush raised in the other. It is
a self-portrait of the artist. The left-hand panel shows a
portrait of the well-known French art critic Pierre Restany
with outstretched arm, as an anarchistic guru. In May
1968 Restany had closed the Musée National d’Art
Moderne in Paris ‘due to public uselessness’. The idea
appealed to Axell.
The art of Evelyne Axell lies within the realms of pop art
and new realism. She developed a painting technique that
was completely her own, enamel on opal-coloured
Plexiglas. With these striking materials she portrayed her
poetic vision of the reality and the atmosphere of May
1968. Her colourful silhouette figures are a reference to
the posters, the fashion and the psychedelic record covers
of the sixties. In her imaginative and strongly eroticallytinted oeuvre the beauty of the human and, in particular,
the female body is her favourite subject.
“That is the true concern of art: that which you and I
cannot recognise because it really carries within it the
power of the new, which the generations after us will
judge, (...).”
Stefan Hertmans
JOZEF PEETERS
1895, Antwerp – 1960, Antwerp
Vase no. 1
1923
Oil on ceramic
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
After the First World War some artists rebelled against
individualism and bourgeois society. All their hopes were
directed at the growing technological society. Artists
worked for an objective and universal art. They created a
pure, abstract language of images. Jozef Peeters, too,
evolved towards geometrical abstraction from 1918
onwards. After his contacts with Piet Mondriaan in 1921
vertical and horizontal lines appeared in his creations. He
painted, made linocuts that he published in avant-gardist
journals like ‘Het Overzicht’ and applied himself to
ceramics. He saw his focus on applied art as an extension
of his concept of ‘community art’.
GUST DE SMET
1877, Ghent – 1943, Deurle
Nude with bunch of flowers
Naakt met bloementuiltje
1931
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
Gust De Smet, with Frits Van den Berghe and Constant
Permeke was one of the most important figures of Flemish
expressionism, which really only developed fully after the
First World War. During the First World War Gust De Smet
and Frits Van den Berghe fled to the Netherlands, where
they came into contact with German expressionism and
French cubism and fauvism. Their figurative pictures were
inspired by the rural life around them, but show a
distorted, expressive reality, painted mostly in sober
earthy colours. Despite their simultaneous development
the three Flemish expressionists each have their own very
individual approach. Gust De Smet, in search of pure
expression, tried to capture the essence with simplified
forms.
RENÉ GUIETTE
1893, Antwerp – 1976, Wilrijk
Untitled
Zonder titel
ca. 1935-1936
Oil on canvas
Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend
René Guiette’s work resembles Art Brut and sometimes a
more meditative style. After a post-cubist period he opted
for a more personal art in which the focus was on the use
and study of matter, colour and symbols. Towards the end
of his life this led to very pure, meditative and abstract
works, akin to Zen teaching. In his monochrome paintings
he often incorporated matter such as sand or cement.
From the nineteen thirties he applied himself to
photography too.
In 1926 he had Le Corbusier design a house for him, the
only existing construction by Le Corbusier in Belgium.